America's descent into lawlessness is continuing apace. Remember Filmar Abrego Garcia? He was the chap deported to a terrorist prison in El Salvador ‘by mistake’ and afterwards it took all the efforts of a court and about two months of foot-dragging by the US government to get him back. He is still being held in custody, although he’s committed no crime beyond being an undocumented immigrant. While in El Salvador, his lawyers have said in court filings, Garcia and other deportees "were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation".
It's also claimed they were tortured by being "forced to kneel" from 9 pm to 6 am, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. He apparently lost 14kg in the first two weeks. We can only guess at how bad it was.
Last week, Donald Trump visited the site of a new detention centre built in the Everglades in Florida, to be known as Alligator Alcatraz. It seems to be modelled on CECOT, El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, with inmates held en masse in wire cages and sleeping on bunk beds. Remember, the detainees are like Garcia, not even convicted criminals in most cases, just undocumented immigrants.
A few days ago, his lawyers asked the judge handling the case to issue a sort of gagging order to block government officials from "repeatedly maligning him [Garcia] in public statements." The petition to judge Waverley Crenshaw claims, "on the day of Mr. Abrego’s initial appearance [in court], he was assailed in no fewer than twenty separate public statements from across the Executive Branch."
Twenty! In one day!!
In the US, as in this country, when someone is charged with a crime, or could be charged with a crime, the legal representatives of the government and the press must be very careful not to prejudice the potential future trial by revealing stuff that might influence jury members. This is a basic tenet of justice.
Local Criminal Rule 2.01 in Tennessee prohibits anyone from making "an extrajudicial statement . . . that . . . will be disseminated by public communication, and will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding in the matter."
As the brief says, the government is attempting to try the case in the court of public opinion.
Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary claimed publicly Mr. Abrego was "a known terrorist, member of MS-13, a wife beater, and a human trafficker."
America's most senior law officer, Attorney General Pam Bondi even held a news conference where she said Garcia has "solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor" and "played a role in the murder of a rival gang member’s mother."
There are dozens more direct quotes from various senior members of the Trump administration in a similar vein - and all said to be completely 'baseless' by his legal team. It is literally incredible. Even Trump himself, the president of the USA, has claimed Garcia is a member of MS-13, a proscribed criminal gang, and has the name tattooed on his knuckles!!
Yesterday, in another court, Judge Paul Xinis held yet another hearing to try and discover what the Department of Justice (DoJ) intends to do with Mr Garcia, since nobody seems to know.
A few weeks ago, the lawyer who first admitted Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was an administrative error was fired. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, said it wasn’t a mistake at all.
Towards the end of June, the Associated Press agency reported that the government intended to deport Garcia as soon as he is released from the prison in Tennessee, where he is currently being detained. The White House deputy press secretary, Abigail Jackson, categorically denied the story, describing it as fake news.
Garcia, she said, would face the "full force of the American justice system."
In court yesterday, an attorney for the DoJ appeared to confirm Garcia will indeed be deported as soon as he's released, but he wasn't entirely sure. I assume this means they have no evidence at all that Garcia committed any crimes in the USA for which he can be charged. The cost of trying to deport this one wretched individual must now be in the multi-millions.
Judge Xinis ended by scheduling another meeting for this Thursday to allow "someone to testify about the government’s plans to detain and remove Abrego Garcia following his release from pre-trial criminal custody."
In yet another case, documents have been filed claiming that El Salvador has told the UN that "the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons [Garcia and others] lie exclusively" with the USA. This is totally different to what DoJ officials and attorneys have previously told the courts. They have always maintained they couldn’t bring Garcia home.
BREAKING: Documents filed in court today assert that officials from El Salvador told the United Nations that it "facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure" by the U.S. but that "the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the" U.S.— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) 7 July 2025 at 20:54
In fact, they have always had complete control of what happens to Mr Garcia. The DoJ has consistently lied to the courts.
Incidentally, when they eventually brought him back to American soil as ordered, they didn’t return Garcia to Maryland, where his family lived and from where he had been illegally taken, but to a jail in Tennessee hundreds of miles away. It was gratuitous and designed simply to make life difficult.
The whole affair has been a monumental and hugely damaging shambles. The law is being systematically sidelined by the US government at the highest levels by the very people who have sworn an oath to uphold it. It is one step away from anarchy.
Margaret Thatcher once said:
"The first duty of Government is to uphold the law. If it tries to bob and weave and duck around that duty when its inconvenient, if government does that, then so will the governed, and then nothing is safe—not home, not liberty, not life itself."
She was talking in 1975 about a group of councillors in Clay Cross, Derbyshire, who refused to implement the Tory Housing Finance Act, but I think it's an important maxim for all governments.
The Abrego Garcia case is just a microcosm of what is happening to thousands of immigrants, some of whom have lived blameless lives in America for decades, paid taxes, and behaved as decent, hard-working, law-abiding citizens. It is truly shocking to me.
We are barely six months into Trump's second term, and nobody knows how it will all end. But we should all be very worried.
